PubSub's speed unmatched on the Internet

A chance meeting between Salim Ismail and his eventual partner Bob Wyman has led to the creation of one of the Internet's more promising technologies. Both were looking to relocate in New York City back in 2000 and ended up sharing an apartment.

It turned out Wyman had a revolutionary idea and Ismail had business smarts and money. The two created PubSub.com, which has proven it can do what Google cannot: Google searches the past based on your search specifications. PubSub takes your search information, watches for you and alerts you the second the topic you are interested in appears.

"We are the other half of Google, and we complement them. Google is retrospective search and we are prospective search. In other words, Google searches the past and we search the future," Salim said in an interview at a recent Harvard conference.

Google news alerts and eBay auction alerts are similar but glacial; sometimes taking days to notify users, in comparison to Pubsub's split-second matching capability. "No one can match our speed of three billion matches per second. We have a unique algorithm, and as far as we know, nobody has ever been able to do what we've done," Salim said. "It makes information active rather than passive."

The "engine" is based on Wyman's expertise and experience. He is the chief technology officer at PubSub and an Internet pioneer who developed predecessors to Lotus Notes and the first known wide-area-network hypertext system, among other innovations.

Salim, Pubsub's chairman, is a University of Waterloo graduate in theoretical physics who gravitated toward business and computers.

He worked as a management consultant for ITIM Associates in London, England, where he led projects to restructure NatWest Bank, Philips NV and Carlson Wagonlit. Then he graduated into entrepreneurship in the United States.

In essence, their "engine" does what vastly more expensive systems developed by financial institutions to alert traders to shifts in prices or volumes. And it does this in a split second.

PubSub now is ready to go to the next level. Its service is up and running to attract customers and to prove to future investors its technology is scalable, fast and comprehensive.

So far, it has extended its matching capability to 20 million blogs, U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, earthquakes, U.S airport delays and news wire services. More content streams will be added soon.

PubSub provides private-label services to CBS and its news outlets, who tell users "tell us what you're looking for and we will let you know the instant it appears."

Like any tech start-up, PubSub has built its technology and operates a 20-person enterprise based on "angel" investments totalling about US$4-million raised from 26 investors. Its principal angel is Vancouver investor Lance Tracey, who invests in new technologies and is a partner in Canadian real estate Sutton Group.

In a recent interview in Vancouver, Tracey explained his bet on Pubsub. "It's an awesome matching engine. It's brilliant because it means you don't need hundreds of thousands of servers like Google and others," he said.

This technology, once expanded, will be able to tip off users the instant specific automobiles, jobs, concert tickets, cheap flights or goods and services are published.

"For example, if you want to know the instant U2 tickets come up for sale near where you live, the technology will be able to let you know; there's no point finding out about it a month later on Google, Salim said.

Salim's last business, New York Grant Co., helped its Lower Manhattan business clients make successful grant applications in the wake of the 9/11 catastrophe. He then launched Pubsub.

"It was at Waterloo that I got into entrepreneurship. I ran out of money as a student one semester so I made chili and sold it to other students, then I hoarded beer before a beer strike and made a big profit," he said. "I had just finished a course in entrepreneurship."

He began studying to be a civil engineer, as his father was, but changed his mind. "I needed a technical degree but hated civil engineering. When I learned that the second-year curriculum had a course called 'concrete' I just couldn't bear the thought," he said. "I was fascinated by physics."

His parents live in Ontario. Salim loves Canada because it's an "elegant halfway house between the American and English ways of life." But he says New York has the best lifestyle and business opportunities of any city in the world.

"A deal that would take eight months to do in Canada, takes six weeks here," he said. "New York is not conservative and the way of doing business that's evolved here is exceptionally advanced."